We all know that customer satisfaction is a cornerstone of customer
loyalty, and that customer loyalty leads to greater corporate
profitability. Especially now in our poor economy, companies across
America are asking, how do we keep our customers loyal? How do we resolve
customers' problems in a timely fashion? What metrics can we use to
measure and track customer satisfaction?
Respond CenterPoint from Respond, Inc. provides answers to those
questions. It is a centralized feedback management solution platform that
captures and analyzes customer complaints and feedback to meet customer
needs. One of the key features of Respond CenterPoint is its ability to
collect and track information through any communications medium. Whether
it's feedback letters, telephone conversations, faxes or e-mail, Respond
CenterPoint will store this information in electronic format to log,
monitor, analyze and respond (hence the company name).
Respond got its start in the healthcare industry where customer/patient
feedback is extremely important. Today, Respond has a very strong presence
in the healthcare industry and states that its product is the number one
customer feedback solution in this vertical market. According to Respond,
companies in the financial space have also recently shown interest in
CenterPoint and have implemented the solution. Continuing to broaden its
horizon, Respond has used the flexibility of the product to extend into
the travel, automotive and sports industries.
Perhaps the most interesting example of how Respond CenterPoint has
helped track customer complaints is its implementation for the New York
Yankees. New York Stadium Operations staff wanted to implement a
stadium-wide system to capture, track, analyze and resolve guest and fan
feedback. Anyone who knows baseball knows that Yankees fans are the
toughest crowd to please. Just tracking all the complaints about other
rowdy fans, parking, the 'cattle tunnel,' the 6th inning last-call for
alcohol, Jeffrey Maier in right field, not to mention the food, requires a
comprehensive solution. Like most teams, the Yankees have an 'invite-back'
program whereby fans who complain are extended a stadium tour or
complimentary tickets. Using Respond CenterPoint, the New York Yankees can
track repeat complainers and cheaters who are trying to get a freebie. All
we can say is, 'Only in New York!'
Installation
Although we found Respond Center-Point to be quite flexible and fairly
easy to setup, it was not intended as an 'out-of-the- box' turnkey
solution. Thus, Respond offers professional services to design Respond
CenterPoint to meet organizations' individual needs and business rules.
Nevertheless, we did install CenterPoint onto a stand-alone Windows 98 PC
along with the sample demo database, which uses the Microsoft Jet (Access)
engine. Installation was a breeze, requiring a single CD and just a few
simple mouse-clicks to complete the process. We were up and running in
less than two minutes with the sample database. Of course, a true solution
would require more time to integrate with a real customer database.
Documentation
Incredibly, nearly 40 percent of the 'Using Respond' user manual
is devoted to explaining how to execute reports and graphs/charts. This
extensive amount of detail is important, since reporting on customer
feedback is the very core of what Respond does. In the reporting section
of the manual, several sample reports are demonstrated. We liked how
Respond showed each sample report on the left-hand page and a
corresponding screenshot of the appropriate report setup screen shown on
the right-hand page. Unfortunately, the criteria on the report setup
screenshot contained on the right-hand page doesn't exactly match the
results of the report displayed on the left-hand page. For example, one
report setup screen is called Complaint Movement and has the criteria set
to 'Year to Date' and 'Show Data Every <Month>.' However,
the resulting report on the opposite side actually shows data on a 'Weekly'
(not monthly) basis. We found that most, if not all, of the resulting
reporting didn't match the report setup screen, which may confuse users
who are trying to figure out how the sample reports work.
Other than this minor complaint, we were quite pleased with the
documentation, which explained the feature-set in an appropriate
chronological order that made learning the product all the more easy.
Operational Testing
When you first install Respond there are five cards set up in the card
file by default. These cards can be renamed, hidden (if not needed) or
additional cards may be added. In addition, the fields available on each
of the cards can be customized, including fields such as short text, long
text, number, currency, date/time and yes/no fields. This extensive
customization is a common theme we discovered during our tests of Respond.
We were able to quickly and easily add new 'feedback,' such as
complaints, into the system. The system can also be set up to
automatically follow-up with certain 'tasks,' such as follow-up phone
calls to make sure customers are satisfied. The system is quite flexible
in tracking customer feedback in that you can add individual notations to
a single piece of feedback. For example, one piece of correspondence from
a customer may say 'the product was faulty, your tech support was
unhelpful and I was transferred five times to find the right person.'
Each is considered a separate notation by CenterPoint and tied to the one
correspondence. Thus, one customer feedback (via e-mail, phone, etc.) can
have multiple notations and multiple activities tied to it.
CenterPoint has excellent security features, including the ability to
lock out users from re-activating completed complaints or editing
complaints with the status of 'Done.' Another security feature assigns
users the capability to update, create or delete simply by checking the
appropriate checkboxes. In fact, CenterPoint grants individual update,
create and delete privileges to the Complaint, Contact, Aspect, Activity,
Booking Info and Cost card files for greater flexibility. Furthermore,
various security settings can be saved into separate security profiles,
which provides the ability to apply a specific security profile to any
individual user or group of users.
One of the core components of Center-Point is the 'tasks' feature.
A 'task' is a specific action that must be completed by a set date,
such as sending an acknowledgment letter within two days of receiving a
complaint. Tasks are displayed on the Activity card and in the user's
Diary. Users can be warned once they sign into the database that a pending
task allocated to them is almost due or overdue. Once a task is overdue,
it is marked with a red exclamation mark.
We should point out that you can set the working week via the Calendar
GUI, which is used for performance analysis and calculating due dates. In
addition, CenterPoint allows you to define 'aging periods' which are
used to determine when tasks were completed, such as within 5 days
(standard), between 6 and 7 days (aging period 1), between 8 and 10 days
(aging period 2) or in 11 days or more (the remainder). Performance
analysis charts and reports, critical to measuring complaint resolution
time, can be generated based on these aging periods.
CenterPoint has the capability to insert database merge fields into
word processors to quickly generate letters, forms or any other written
correspondence that can incorporate information from the current complaint
record. By selecting a pre-defined template, you can quickly display the
form letter in your word processor, print it automatically and even
register this document in CenterPoint's Activity for future reference.
There are still more capabilities TMC Labs liked. For one, we liked the
ability to attach any file type to a Note or Task. Second, we liked
CenterPoint's powerful and easy-to-use nested condition builder for
writing complex queries that even a novice can use. This query builder
allows you to use parentheses to set order of operations. TMC Labs is
familiar with many 'canned' software programs that don't allow this
level of querying complexity, which then forces the user to write complex
SQL queries, which generally only MIS/IT personnel know how to do. Third,
we were extremely pleased with the canned reports that come with the
package. For example, a sample report allows you to monitor employee
resolution performance by observing employees' responsiveness. Finally,
we found CenterPoint to be extremely customizable, including the GUI and
the reporting functionality. Within the GUI we could show or hide card
files, add or modify card files, resize various screen elements, set
required fields to be a certain color and other GUI-related
customizations.
One last point ' CenterPoint has several optional modules available.
One interesting module is eFeedback, which is a Web site component to
capture, manage and respond to customer feedback, 24-hours a day, with Web
forms and e-mail that feed directly to your Respond CenterPoint database.
Room For Improvement
Although we found CenterPoint to be fairly intuitive, its usability
could be improved. For instance, the program's GUI appears to be a bit
dated, having more of a Windows 3.1 look to it than Windows 98/2000. The
program could also use right-click functionality, for example, to complete
a task. Another usability suggestion pertains to opening existing
complaints. When we tried to find a complaint dated a few days earlier
through the Open Complaint window, it wouldn't display. Eventually we
figured out that the Date Filter was set to a range outside the complaint's
date. Basically, within the Open Complaint window, the Date Filter says
'Complaint Receipt Date Between'' and then doesn't display the
date range even though there clearly is room on the screen to display this
information. Thus, we suggest Respond display the date range and not
require the user to open the Date Range filter screen.
Finally, we found that adding a 'memorized contact' to a complaint
was counter-intuitive. First, we had to click on the New button, then
click on the Memorized Contact option. We first thought that when we
clicked on New and then Memorized Contact we would be adding a new
memorized contact. In fact, we were querying existing memorized contacts.
We suggest a separate button called either 'Search' or 'Add Existing
Memorized Contact' to the main Complaint window.
Conclusion
Respond CenterPoint does an excellent job of helping companies capture
and analyze customer feedback, including complaints, service requests,
inquiries and transactions. By capturing and analyzing customer feedback,
companies will be better able to understand customers' needs, helping
companies become better equipped to meet those customers' needs, which
should lead to a satisfied and loyal customer base. That said, CenterPoint
is not cheap, starting at $15,000. However, it is said that it costs 10
times more money to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an
existing customer. With that in mind, combined with the current economic
climate, retaining your existing customers has become even more essential,
making CenterPoint a practical solution.
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To The January 2002 Table Of Contents ]
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